In its full conception, the Attivio Intelligence Engine is something like Endeca + RDBMS + search engine + XML store + cool extra features. And all with seamless, lightweight, integrated installation and administration. That’s the goal, anyway. At this point, naturally, each individual piece is far from complete. For example:

• Sufficient SQL support to handle most BI tools is still a matter for future releases — apparently in 2009, although Attivio is one of those agile companies for which pinning down product releases is somewhat difficult.
• The same goes some basic GUI features (such as most non-programmatic search tuning).
• ACID compliance is not a high priority for Attivio. I actually think it should be higher, just because it’s increasingly become an “OK, we don’t have to worry about THAT” checkmark item.

Even in its early days, Attivio has had some nice-sounding customer successes. There are 8 paying Attivio customers, including 2 > $1 million deals, one half-millionish dollar deal, and 1 large OEM. 3 represent actual deployments, with the rest in development. More sales are on the way, as are permissions to disclose customer names that people will actually recognize. Customer application stories Andrew told me about include:

• A web-business parameterized, adjustable-weight search that’s starting with tabular data and only getting to free-text later.
• An enterprise that’s using Attivio for content management, enterprise search, public-facing search, and data warehousing.
• Something big/mysterious/classified, with large document volumes.
• Something to do with compliance, about which Andrew was going to forward a lot more detail that evening (Hint, hint).

Since the major RDBMS (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2) all have text search and XML subsystems, they can in principle do everything Attivio does on the back end, and with a lot more features and maturity. The same would go for Marklogic. Performance and overhead might be different matters, however; Andrew certainly believes so.

Except that Lucene is included on the search side, I haven’t actually figured out how Attivio stores data. The fact that SQL features are being added incrementally suggests Attivio is rolling its own relational database capability, but how it’s organized I don’t really know.

Attivio is having a house party and product rollout in the latter part of January, and details are scarce in the mean time. But here are some highlights.

• Attivio was founded in August. It has 21 people and 1 VC. The VC has invested >$6 million and committed >$12 million total.
• Attivio has ambitious plans for a fully integrated data management/real-time BI stack. It’s currently called the “Active Intelligence Engine.”
• The data management part combines tabular, text, and XML data. The tabular part is some kind of bitmap. The text part is fairly traditional, and based on Lucene.
• One point of this architecture is that one can more or less seamlessly join different kinds of data.
• Another point is surely that — with everything being more or less like a column or bitmap — memory management and administration are manageable issues.
• Despite containing all these wonders, the code is under 10 megs total. At least right now. But then — how much code can one write in a few months?
• Andrew didn’t want me to repeat everything he said about target markets, but clearly Wall Street is one of the top possibilities.

Stay tuned.